Good service begins with visibility – Cisco Blogs

Beep Beeeeep Beep…. Oh no! It’s 4:48 a.m. and I overslept; I needed to be up by 4:30 a.m. to catch my connecting flight to London Heathrow. This is going to be close. I check my phone and can see my Lyft is only five minutes away. Hopefully I get a fast driver.   During the frantic drive to the airport, I check in online but I still have to check a bag when I get there. I race into the terminal and see a large crowd where the check-in desks are. Ouch, this is bad, I cannot miss this flight! As I race-walk past the crowd, I see the problem: the terminals are malfunctioning, and the staff is desperately trying to manage the growing crowd and troubleshoot the glitch. Travelers are grumbling about missing flights and asking if the kiosks are this messed up how do they know their bags will actually get to their destination. Their experience makes them question the entire operations of their airline–and if they picked the right airline to begin with.

As I walk up to my airline’s terminals, they’re all working, making the check-in process quick and easy. As I board my first flight to Newark I grin because I know a few months back my airline implemented a plan to bring visibility to their entire network to prevent things like the downed kiosks and long lines the other airline’s customers are currently experiencing.

The airline I’m currently on worked with Cisco and their partner to design this plan, because they understood that Cisco’s focus for years has been on innovation and acquisitions to achieve end-to-end visibility. To know if the kiosks aren’t working, they can now run AppDynamics, which can both provide information about the status of the app on the kiosk and why it is not working if it is down. Using the Nexus dashboard, they can see all the flows across the fabric and the health of the fabric in their Datacenter. The ML/AI assurance engine in Cisco’s DNA Center can detect and predict issues with the wired and wireless network, and with Meraki Insight they get traffic analytics and visibility. And Cisco’s recent acquisition of ThousandEyes lets customers—like my current airline—and partners see what is happening on their network and even outside their network so they can understand if it is them or another network that is down.

In order to keep customers like me happy and having a great experience, you need end-to-end visibility to keep things running smoothly. Even when we miss our own alarm clocks.

Learn more about how Cisco’s end-to-end portfolio can help partners keep your customers in the know about what’s really happening across the entire network.

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